Welcome to my blog. I've been knitting for more years than I want to admit to, quilting for 25 years, spinning for 9 years, and I've been weaving for over a year.

August 25, 2003

Summer Ends

What a beautiful weekend! I'm heading out in a few minutes for a drive into the Poconos to visit a friend and sit by her pond and spin. The wheel is still in the car from my spinning group's meeting yesterday, where I spun the blue with purple and teal mohair batt. It's really quite beautiful. I'm excited about the way the blending turned out. In fact, all of it was the result of a swap switch we made a one of our meetings a few months ago. I'm also going to take up my spindle and the batts for the tropical fish. The humidity and temps have dropped the last few days around here and it's always cooler in the mountains, so I'm looking forward to a wonderful day.

I finished Alive Guy for Josh. He wanted a negative image that was about 4 feet high and 5.5 feet wide and he left the rest to me. After listening to your suggestions, I went with painting it on black fabric. I stitched the sides about 1" in from the side and am allowing it to fray. The top has a casing where we stuck in a piece of screen door molding to hang it with. The bottom is the selvedge so there is no finishing. I bought some fabric paint but then I looked at that squeeze bottle and knew I wasn't going to squeeze the whole thing! Right at my feet was an almost finished can of ceiling paint from my previous painting (sometimes not putting things away is a plus!) and pulled out a little stencil brush and started to scrub the paint into the fabric. I wanted to a get an open, uneven look and that was super easy to do :-) After it dried I went around and outlined it about .5" in from the edge with an opalescent white that has a little dimension to it. He's thrilled and promptly took it over to West Chester to hang it up. If I ever get lonely for the little guy, Alive - not Josh! - I have this to remind me of him! Now I remember why I have all those ugly vinyl tablecloths! Actually I can scrap it off with a fingernail so I'll just scrub it off with a little nylon scrub pad.

August 23, 2003

My Mistake...

I wasn't recovering from a sinus headache I was just getting into a sinus infection! That put a dent into my flurry of "before-school-starts" activities. But yesterday I was able to do a little carding. I carded the wild shades of corrie I dyed at Claudia's dye day. I'm spinning some up to use for felted fish in Knitter's Stash and the rest I want to use for needle felting. I bought all the supplies at MDS&W this spring for summer experimentation and have yet to use it. Well, even though school is starting I guess it's still officially summer for a few more weeks.

The batts on the left are a blend of blues, teal, and a few purple locks. The center isn't as pretty in this picture as it is in real life - it's a mostly a deep green and blue mix, but with some undyed parts of the locks coming through as a glow of paler color. On the monitor it looks duller with more neps (you just have to take my word for it!). On the right are the clear bright colors that I got from the fiber reactive dye (Sabracon).